So no public spending review this autumn. Significantly, the confirmation came not from the Treasury or the Chancellor but from the ubiquitous Peter Mandelson, who now seems to have as much of a government-wide remit to pontificate on policy as the Prime Minister. Of course announcing there would be no spending review also helped deflect attention from the fact that the Business Secretary has been forced to pigeon-hole his plans for part-privatisation of the Post Office -- but I'm sure that's just a coincidence ....
Peter Mandelson tells us it's all too uncertain to make a three-year forecast for public spending. But spending reviews are, by their nature, uncertain and the government has already published its debt requirements for the years ahead, so it could also take a stab at its tax and spend.
The Tories claim the review has been conveniently postponed until after the election because any credible review would show that a Labour government would have to cut spending too.
Many independent (and even centre-left) commentators agree. To some extent it's given the Tories a "get-out-of-jail" card: how can we go into details of what we'd cut, they'll now be able to say to people like me, when the government won't tell us its tax-and-spend plans?
So what does it all mean? It doesn't much affect spending for the current financial year (2009/10) or the next (2010/11). But a spending review would have given us the course of spending for 2011/12, 2012/13 and 2013/14. We're now pretty much in the dark over what happens to spending from April 2011 onwards. But not entirely.
The Budget Red Book contained a spending "envelope" which showed spending rising from £702 billion in 2010/11 to £756 billion in 2013/14. But that's in nominal terms ie before allowing for inflation (and nominal spending has risen every year since 1947). Factor in the government's own inflation forecasts and the spending trend goes from £702 billion to £700 billion -- in other words a fall in real terms of 0.3% over the four years. A spending review would have had to spell this out in more detail -- or explained why these projections no longer held.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies already has done the detail -- and the Treasury has not challenged its sums. You might think a 0.3% fall not huge after a massive spending-and-borrowing boom. But the spending totals to 2014 include an 8% rise in interest payments (to service our ballooning debt, which will cost as much every year as the defence budget) and transfer payments that rise automatically in a downturn, such as the dole.
When the IFS took account of these it discovered that what was left for departments to spend fell 7% over what should have been the new spending review period (or down 10% if you ring-fence health and down over 13% for all other departments if you ring-fence health and education).
I've said several times on-air that, with that sort of spending envelope, you wouldn't want to be Alistair Darling compiling this autumn's spending review -- especially not when your next door neighbour is talking constantly about never-ending rises in public spending.
Well, now Mr Darling doesn't even have to be Mr Darling. For there ain't no spending review to worry about -- which is not the same as saying there's nothing to worry about public spending from 2011 onwards.
Peter Mandelson on his position regarding a possible government spending review this year
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This Blog has indicated several times that the Labour/Tory argument currently raging over public spending cuts v increases might be something of a phoney war (it dominated PMQs again yesterday) -- because whoever wins the next election will face some very tough tax-and-spend questions given the ballooning national debt. Looks like the Governor of the Bank of England agrees.
Yesterday Mervyn King told MPs that Britain was heading for "extraordinary" levels of borrowing and that the government needed to reduce it faster than ministers were planning. The present path, he said, was "not clear enough." He wanted the government to show "greater ambition" and publish a plan to deal with the down-scaling of the debt in the Chancellor's pre-Budget Report due out this autumn.
I'm not sure he's going to get his way that soon. The pre-Budget Report will form the backdrop to a Spring 2010 general election and I doubt the Chancellor (or the Tories) will want to be too explicit about the spending cuts and/or tax rises needed for a speedy reduction in debt. But the markets will expect action after the election, whoever wins.
Crediting agencies are already putting our national credit rating (at the moment the highest possible at Treble A) on their watch list: if they think our debt is going to remain "extraordinary" for too long then they could easily downgrade us -- which would make it much harder and more expensive for the government to borrow.
Hence the Governor's call for debt to be brought down to normal levels in the lifetime of a single Parliament. Of course, debt would fall more dramatically if the economy returned to healthy growth. But few think that is going to happen anytime soon. The OECD projects zero growth for Britain in 2010 and thinks our debt will reach a dizzying 14% of GDP in fiscal year 2010/11 -- which would mean borrowing over £200 billion in just one year (rather than the £173 billion envisaged in the last Budget). The Governor is also pessimistic:
"There are genuine concerns about how quickly the recovery will pick up," he told MPs. "Uncertainty over the global economy makes it very difficult to be confident of rapid recovery."
The Governor of the Bank of England speaking on Wednesday
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Last week Gordon Brown told us that the Iraq inquiry would be held "in private" because it would allow witnesses to be freer with their testimony. A week later and it's pretty clear the bulk of the inquiry will be held in public, with witnesses testifying under oath. Mr Brown's original statement was met with a wail of opposition from the Tories, Lib Dems, senior mandarins, the media, relatives of soldiers killed in action and, eventually, even the chairman of the inquiry himself. A senior Labour figure told me last night that the row could have been avoided if "Brown had consulted properly before announcing the inquiry, as Thatcher did with the Franks' inquiry [into the Falklands War]."
The Tories are forcing a debate on the subject today and, though Mr Brown will instinctively resist a U-turn brought about by Tory pressure, the case for a behind-closed-doors inquiry has already been lost. It was probably doomed the moment some papers reported at the weekend that Tony Blair had been privately lobbying for evidence to be given "in camera". Some even speculated privately that Peter Mandelson, still looking after his old master's bidding, had also urged Mr Brown to keep it private. That suspicion was probably the final nail in the coffin for many!
A taste of what sort of testimony the inquiry will hear was given yesterday by General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff (i.e. the British Army's top banana), who told the Royal United Services Institute that Britain failed to stabilise Iraq after the 2003 invasion because it was too quick to move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. He said that the failure to take advantage of a "window of consent" in the immediate aftermath of the invasion had opened the door to the Shia militias and that we had not kept enough troops on the ground. "We failed to maintain the force levels required, either of coalition forces or Iraqi forces," he said "particularly towards the later end of the campaign, by which time we were already committed to a new operation in Afghanistan."
He's not alone in thinking that. But remember: this is the same General who said in 2006 that British troops should get out of Iraq altogether because their presence was making the security situation worse.
And who then told the BBC in 2008: "We have achieved what we set out to achieve ... we have been quite clear about what we had to do and we have done it ... The job is done and Basra and southern Iraq is a much better place now than it was under Saddam Hussein in 2002."
Some might be forgiven for thinking that this is a General who is all over the place -- and that it's not just the politicians who have some tough questions to answer come the Inquiry.
Speaker John Bercow's real challenge begins now: to convince the Tories that he is worthy of the post.
I'd discount feverish talk of Tories already planning to remove him after the election when they expect to have a decent majority in the Commons and can impose their own Speaker. I suspect any incoming Tory government will have a lot more to worry about than Speaker Bercow and he'd really have to screw things up between now and the election for his removal to be on the agenda.
That said he has a mountain to climb to establish his authority and impartiality. Just how hated - not to strong a word - he is on his own side could be seen from how most Tory MPs sat on their hands when his victory was announced. When the Father of the House called him to be Speaker a Tory MP heckled "Labour Speaker". When Gordon Brown said his election had healed "party divisions" the Tory benches erupted in disagreement.
The fact is that most Tory MPs see Speaker Bercow as maverick Tory who has sucked up to Labour and, as a result, is disliked by his own side. They think that's why so many Labour MPs voted for him -- to appear non-partisan by voting for a Tory, but in fact installing one that the Tories detest.
These moods can change. If Speaker Bercow establishes his independence and integrity from the start and quickly begins the process of radical reform, then old hatreds will slowly die. If not, then the issue of who is Speaker will remain as contentious as it was under Michael Martin.
The wider public could be forgiven for thinking that, in the most crucial election for Speaker in living memory and at a time of crisis in parliamentary democracy, too many MPs voted for narrow party advantage and petty personal reasons rather than the broader needs of our democracy.
Gordon Brown's re-launch is struggling to get off the ground as problems crowd in on him from all sides. Even today's vote for a new Speaker is being muddied by claims that the government mobilised the whips to round up support for Margaret Beckett's candidacy, on the grounds that she'd be an establishment-minded Speaker (Harriet Harman denies the whips are mobilising for anybody). 
But Mr Brown has bigger problems on several other fronts. His plan to hold the Iraqi inquiry in private has provoked a huge row, undermining any credit he hoped to get for launching an inquiry in the first place. The issue is given even greater piquancy by reports that Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell were keen that proceedings should be behind closed doors. This revelation alone almost guarantees that the government will have to do a U-turn and agree that the inquiry should take place in public.
Then there's the telling riposte from the father of one of the Iraqi hostages who complains that "the PM can make the time and effort to telephone both Simon Cowell and Piers Morgan [to find out about the health of Susan Boyle] but he wouldn't contact families waiting to learn the fate of their sons kidnapped in Iraq." Ouch!
The father claims Mr Brown doesn't "give a damn", describes the Foreign Office as "useless" and dismisses Foreign Secretary David Miliband as a "waste of space". With two hostages dead and the fate of the others unknown, this has the capacity to be not just a huge human tragedy but a political nightmare for the government.
And speaking of political nightmares, how about this: government ministers have been promising for some time to get a grip of the immigration numbers, especially now that unemployment is rising fast, but this morning we learn that the number of British passports being handed out to migrants is set to rise to a record 220,000 this year.
No so much a re-launch into summer for Mr Brown as the stumbling of the walking wounded.
The official list of MPs allowances and expenses for 2004-08 has been uploaded, at last, onto the Parliament website since the early hours of this morning. You can look up your own MP and download PDFs of his or her expense claims for the past four years.
A triumph for open politics? Not quite. This version of MPs expenses is heavily censored. MPs have been able to go through their claims with a marker-pen and take out not just personal details like addresses but a number of things that are potentially embarrassing, such as unsuccessful claims, and crucial details that allow us to determine if the MP flipped his or her homes to avoid capital gains tax, which many regard as among the most egregious of abuses.
The result of this so-called "redaction" is huge swathes of blacked out pages which hide information which has been vital to the massive Daily Telegraph investigation, which has been based on the "unredacted" expenses files. The official information still contains plenty to outrage voters since it reveals that many MPs thought they could charge just about everything, from a can-opener (the outgoing Speaker) to fancy furniture (the incoming Defence Secretary), to the taxpayer. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that, without the Telegraph's uncensored files, we would never have known the full extent of the Great Expenses Scandal and many MPs would have been able to cover up just how far they were milking the system.
Be in no doubt: the scandal still has the capacity to destroy careers. Kitty Ussher, appointed to the Treasury only days ago, has been forced to resign after it was revealed she had was a "flipper" and had avoided capital gains tax on the sale of her constituency home in Burnley. Ms Ussher is not just leaving the government. She's leaving politics. She's not the first to fall foul of the great expenses disclosure -- and she certainly won't be the last.
Gordon Brown continued to road test his "Labour spending versus Tory cuts" narrative yesterday at the GMB conference, where he repeated his claim that the Tories would cut spending by 10%, even though the Tories (and many independent commentators) insist that 10% cuts are implicit in Mr Brown's own official figures (see the Budget Red Book and IFS calculations based on it).
Confirmation that there will be cuts whoever wins the next election comes from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which argues that under Labour's existing spending plans there will be 350,000 job losses in the public sector over the next six years. The Institute's chief economist warns of a "bloodbath" in the public finances: "The fiscal squeeze implied by government plans (my italics) will result in 350,000 job cuts in the public sector between 2010/11 and 2014/15."
The unions are not buying the Brown narrative either. Unison general secretary Dave Prentis says he's stopping the financial aid his union gives to 64 Labour MPs vowing there would be no more "blank cheques" for Labour since it was pursuing "policies that are damaging our public services".
Yet Mr Brown and his Little Sir Echo (aka Ed Balls) maintain that only the Tories will cut spending by 10%. Mr Balls has gone even further, promising to ring fence not just health but education spending after 2011. Using the government's own figures that would imply cuts of 13.5% in all other government departments.
There are signs of a split -- or at least a difference in emphasis and tactics -- within the government. The Treasury pointedly refused to endorse Mr Balls' promise to increase education spending and there are reports that Chancellor Darling and Peter Mandelson (Lord of all He Surveys) would like to "come clean" about Labour spending plans but are being resisted by Mr Brown and Mr Balls.
This morning all the recent talk of green shoots of recovery are put into relief by the latest jobless figures: unemployment increased by 232,000 to 2.26 million in the three months to April.
As we go on air at 1200 BST today (1500 in Tehran), tension in Tehran will hit a new high as opposing demonstrations converge near the city centre. Seven anti-Ahmadinejad demonstrators were shot yesterday -- and that could be a game changer. There was an earlier expectation that the protests would peter out but the shootings have given them a new momentum.
The reformists face an uphill struggle: the power of Iran's theocratic rulers is immense, as is there ruthlessness -- the crackdown has already begun with dozens of opposition activists arrested since the protests began. But there is no doubt the country's Islamic Establishment is surprised and rocked by the vehemence of the reaction to yet another rigged election.
Iran's powerful Guardian Council, which is under the control of the country's so-called Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei (who is appointed for life and more powerful than any politician), says it is ready to recount disputed votes from Friday's presidential poll, which is something of a U-turn -- though the ruling mullahs might simply be playing for time rather than finding an unlikely enthusiasm for honest ballots.
We are in unchartered territory here and only a mug would predict the outcome. But we will bring the latest, live, on BBC2 at noon, and discuss developments with the Liberal Democrats' former leader and foreign policy expert, Sir Menzies Campbell
So last week's gaffe has become this week's party policy orthodoxy.
Tory Health spokesman Andrew Lansley let slip last week that a future Tory government would have to cut public spending. Gordon Brown couldn't believe his luck (it's been in short supply recently) and the Tory high command squirmed. But this morning Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne writes in The Times:
"We should have the confidence to tell the public the truth that Britain faces a debt crisis; that existing plans show that real spending will have to be cut, whoever is elected; and that the bills of rising unemployment and the huge interest costs of a soaring national debt mean that many government departments will face budget cuts. These are statements of fact and to deny them invites ridicule."
So what's happened to provoke this bout of Tory "honesty"? The Cameroons have always feared that in any "Labour spending v Tory cuts" debate, they'd lose. But since Mr Lansley let the cat out of the bag and Labour, from the Prime Minister down, has attacked the Tories for planning to cut spending by 10%, the debate has not gone Labour's way.
Starting with several economically literate bloggers, who quickly worked out that Labour's own figures for spending after 2011 implied substantial cuts, the mainstream media on the Left and Right came to the consensus that cuts are inevitable whoever wins the election. So Labour's "Tory cuts" narrative has failed to gain traction, emboldening the Tories to come clean on spending cuts.
Just how hard Labour is finding it, even on the Left, to gain credence for its "Tory cuts" attack is illustrated beautifully in this morning's Guardian. In an echo of what Gordon Brown wrote at the weekend, Ed Balls smears the Tory leadership as "Mr 10%", only to be roundly condemned on the same comment pages by left-wing columnist Jackie Ashley.
Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, talks through the Tory and Labour spending plans on Thursday's Daily Politics
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Suddenly this week looks like ending a lot better for Gordon Brown than it started. An authoritative think-tank says the recession has ended, the Tory flank is exposed to Labour attacks on spending cuts and the threat to his leadership is over. What's not to smile about if you're the PM, after many, many grim weeks?
Of course, each reason to smile is not as clear cut as it seems -- for example his leadership will no doubt soon come back into play -- but Mr Brown is bound to feel chipper than he has since at least the G20 summit. He should enjoy the current mood -- it probably won't last.
Mr Brown believes that the combined effect of a huge fiscal stimulus and a massive boost to the money supply has stopped the recession from being far worse than it might have been -- and now the National Institute for Economic and Social Research is even saying that the recession has actually ended.
Government ministers are right to be cautious. The economy might have stopped sinking in recent months but that is probably because companies have started rebuilding their stocks (inventories) after running them down to zero and because the sliding pound has made our exports more competitive. But the pound is now rising again and unless consumer spending picks up -- not clear in the short term -- companies will soon stop their re-stocking. So any recovery in 2009 could be short-lived at worst, anaemic at best -- an economists' recovery in the sense that only economists can see it while everybody else still worries about rising unemployment, closing companies and home repossessions.
Nevertheless, the government is accumulating ammunition to be able to claim that its response to the financial meltdown is working and could even confound the more dismal forecasters in the City. Whether it gets political credit for it is another matter. The British economy was recovering quite nicely when John Major went to the country in 1997 but the voters had already decided they had more than enough of him and his party. That's the danger for Mr Brown in a year's time, even if the green shoots are all around us.
Mr Brown was in his element yesterday at PMQs because he had Tory spending cutters in his sights: nothing pleases the PM more than to contrast his big spending with Tory spending cuts. But it didn't wash on yesterday's Daily Politics and it hasn't washed in this morning's papers, on the left or the right. Almost everybody accepts that there will be cuts after the next election, whoever wins.
Let me explain in more detail than I was able to on yesterday's show what is at stake here. The most recent Budget Red Book forecasts that total public spending in real terms (the figures the PM read out yesterday did not allow for inflation) will fall 0.1% a year for the three years starting April 2011.
That doesn't seem like much but when you take into account the rising interest bill to service the massive debt the government is accumulating plus spending on which the government has no choice (such as pensions, dole, welfare) then it means quite severe cuts in departmental budgets -- which the IFS calculates at 2.3% a year, making a total of 7% cuts in the three years starting April 2011.
So under Labour's present plans, as published in its own Red Book, departmental spending would fall by 7% over three years. Not quite the continuing rise in spending Mr Brown would have us believe. But the Tories are promising to ring-fence health spending with continued real increases. Do that and, as Tory Health spokesman Andrew Lansley admitted yesterday, all the other departments will face an accumulated 10% cut.
So I suppose you could say the choice is between Labour cuts of 7% and Tory cuts of 10% (but with health protected). Except that Labour is also now saying it would ring-fence health -- at least that's what new Health Secretary Andy Burnham seemed to be saying on Channel 4 News last night, though it wasn't completely clear. I understand this morning that the Health Department is indicating that, under Labour, health would enjoy real spending increases for the foreseeable future. If that's the case then, under Labour's existing plans, the other departments would also face a 10% cut, similar to what the Tories envisage.
In other words, for all the froth and steam, both parties are really saying much the same thing!
Having won his stay of execution from his own supporters, Gordon Brown begins the struggle to redefine and rehabilitate himself today among the wider public, with plans to "clean up" politics and talk up the case for wider constitutional reform. It will be interesting to see how long this new show stays on the road.
Cleaning up politics should be the easy bit since there is enormous public support for it and a measure of all-party consensus. But it remains to be seen if the public will trust those who presided over the abuses (looking the other way until disclosure forced them to confront the scandals) with the clean up. The danger for the PM and the government is that both are so thoroughly discredited in the public's eyes (just look at the election results) that voters won't believe a word they say (a repeat of the dying days of the Major years).
Nor have things got off to an auspicious start. Shahid Malik, who was forced to quit as a minister pending an investigation into his expenses, has just been reinstated because the investigation has apparently cleared him. I say "apparently" because the report into his expenses is not to be made public so neither I nor you can really tell. So much for all these promises of a new transparency.
Nor is it clear how big the appetite is among voters for constitutional reform. In the midst of a terrible recession and with so many MPs being seen to have their snouts in the trough, I'm not sure people's minds automatically turn to the case for voting reform, fixed term parliaments, an elected Lords or any other of the constitutional wheezes currently reverbating round the Westminster chattering classes with renewed enthusiasm.
It could be the most striking example yet of how the Westminster village is often in another country from the folk who put them there. Most people, I humbly suggest, want honest politicians and to know that their job and homes will be secure in the current downturn (and if they're not, what the government is doing about it). A rarified discussion on the merits of AV versus STV voting systems might not quite catch the public mood.
I suspect the whole thing will also be greeted with a certain public cynicism. After all, the government has flirted regularly with electoral reform but never come close to consummating it. And there have already been several reforms of the Lords, which seems to be a never-ending process rather than an end-game. Voters are likely to ask what the government could hope to achieve in a year that it has not managed in 12.
Time is a serious constraint: the Brown government has a year to run at most. Parliamentary expenses can be cleaned up in that time but, with the best will in the world, it is hard to see how any important constitutional reform could be implemented in that time. Nor is it clear that it should be: constitutional reform should always be considered and unrushed, done after much contemplation and widespread national debate.
Voters who see a government rushing to re-brand itself with such reforms might not think the Brown government quite fits the reforming bill.
BBC News' Laura Kuenssberg reports on the possible changes to voting systems, and how they have been used in Welsh, Scottish and London elections:
So the revolution has been postponed -- at least for now. After the failure of the Cabinet to mount a Palace Coup, Labour backbenchers couldn't bring themselves to stage a Peasants' Revolt, even after two sets of disastrous election results. Indeed the Peasants are blaming the Cabinet for making their position impossible: those on the Labour back benches who most wanted rid of Gordon Brown are blaming several Cabinet ministers' lack of "bottle" for not following James Purnell's example and resigning in his wake.
If that had happened, say the rebels, Mr Brown would be on his way out and Labour would be preparing for a leadership contest. But without more Cabinet defections (David Miliband? Alan Johnson?) the Peasants had nobody of enough stature to rally round and their revolt petered out last night when the PM appeared before the Parliamentary Labour Party and promised to "change".
So the PM lives to fight another day: the next leadership wobbles will come if Labour loses two looming by-elections in July. The febrile and fragile state of the Labour party, despite Mr Brown successfully seeing off the latest challenge, can be gauged from David Milliband's interview on the Today Programme this morning. It was a stranger performance and included this quote: "My generation in the Labour party will not throw away the privilege of government." Since Mr Brown is not of his generation, what on earth did he mean?
Click the play button below to hear the full interview.
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The rebels have lacked a champion or evidence that a new leader would do better than Mr Brown come the election. But a poll in this morning's Independent suggests that with Alan Johnson as leader we'd have a hung Parliament rather than a Labour rout. Since the Independent has called for Brown to go, you think they might have managed to publish their poll yesterday, rather than when it was all over bar the shouting.
Last week this blog said that Gordon Brown's worst nightmare in the Euro-elections would be for Labour to come behind Ukip and for the BNP to win one or two seats in the Brussels/Strasbourg Parliament. Well, the PM's worst nightmare has become reality.
Labour's share of the vote was just under 16% (the worst Labour result in any election in living memory), one point behind Ukip (17%) and 12 points behind the Tories (28%). Oh yes, and for the first time ever in this country's long democratic history we've elected two neo-fascists to a Parliament.
This is a devastating double-whammy for Labour MPs -- a humiliation and an embarrassment for them -- and today they must decide how much Gordon Brown is to blame and if they should raise the standard of revolt at tonight's meeting of Labour backbenchers. I wouldn't hold your breath: a Palace Coup to remove the PM has already petered out (the Cabinet couldn't quite bring itself to tell Gordon to go) and I wouldn't expect a Peasants' Revolt to do much better. But we'll see.
Labour MPs have until early evening to take in the enormity of their party's defeat. The details are even more depressing than the headline disaster. In the South-East (excluding London), Labour came 5th, behind not just the Tories and Ukip but behind the Lib Dems and even the Greens (!), with a mere 8% of the vote. Incredibly they did even worse in the South-West, coming 5th with only 7.7% of the vote.
The significance of these unimaginably bad results for many Labour MPs is this: the South of England is home to a huge number of Labour marginals and Labour seats only moderately safe. If Labour under Gordon Brown is coming close to wipeout in the South, then scores of Labour seats are in jeopardy come the general election and even Labour MPs who thought they were reasonably safe must now be worried.
Coming behind Ukip nationally and seeing two BNP members elected on their watch will be hugely symbolic for many Labour MPs -- but they were anticipated (by me and others). Nobody predicted a third result of immense symbolism: the Tories coming first in Labour Wales. It doesn't mean the Valleys have gone Tory but to be beaten by the Tories in their Welsh fiefdom will have many Labour MPs shaking their heads in despair (and the Nationalists will have beaten Labour in their other Celtic Fiefdom, Scotland).
The Tories can hardly contain their delight. True, they only got just under 28% of the vote, just up on 2004, as voters preferred third parties to the official opposition. But on the basis of both the local and Euro-election results they would be clear winners come the general election. Indeed leading Tories now think they have the best of all possible worlds: Labour has crashed and burned at the polls but still hasn't the stomach to change leaders.
"Labour is stuck with a lame-duck leader heading a lame-duck government," said one Tory shadow minister to me this morning. "It looks like it will stay that way til the election. If you're a Tory, it doesn't get better than that."
It was meant to be a radical reshuffle to reinvigorate the Brown government but the growing mood in Westminster is that it is the reshuffle of a lame-duck Prime Minister. What is clear is that this is not the reshuffle the PM wanted.
Hazel Blears, Jacqui Smith and, dramatically late last night, James Purnell had already reshuffled themselves out of the Cabinet before Gordon Brown could sack or move them.
Then it became clear that he no longer had the authority to move Alistair Darling from the Treasury, even though it is now pretty certain that he wanted to make Ed Balls Chancellor (he even offered Mr Purnell the Balls job at education). Suddenly The PM's options were limited and he look cribbed and confined.
Mr Darling, Mr Balls, David Miliband and Jack Straw all stay put. John Denham goes to Health, Alan Johnson (everybody's favourite caretaker successor) goes to the Home Office (a poisoned chalice if ever there was one) and Alan Sugar gets a peerage and a junior position at Business. Much ado about nothing, you might think.
It certainly doesn't reshape the Brown government in away that voters will much notice. And still things continue to unravel for the PM: as I write John Hutton, a leading Blairite, has resigned as Defence Secretary.
And the local government election results are even worse than predicted for Labour. Mr Brown has gone from crisis to deep crisis.
MESSAGE FROM THE DP TEAM: Wondering why the DP mainly looked at international affairs and the BBC closed this blog - and other political blogs - on Thursday? Then click here and look at paragraph 7.1 on page 13. All restrictions are lifted now the polls have closed.
THIS BLOG WAS CLOSED ON POLLING DAY - AND ALL POST-0600 ENTRIES WERE REMOVED (to comply with election broadcast rules)
Yesterday this Blog observed that the left-wing press was deserting Gordon Brown -- and 24 hours later, following hard on the heels of the Independent, the country's most important left-wing daily, The Guardian, has this morning called on the PM to go.
In the grand scheme of things, hostile newspaper editorials (even from usually sympathetic newspapers) are the least Gordon Brown has to worry about. Far more important is the impression that the government is disintegrating beneath his very feet and the growing view that, post Thursday's elections, the chances of a backbench revolt and/or a serious leadership challenge are growing by the day. And that's where the newspapers are important.
Labour MPs and activists read the Guardian and the Independent and, by and large, care about what they say. The combined effect of the editorials will be to reinforce those who want Mr Brown to go and to push those who are wavering in that direction too. We still don't know if that is the majority mood in the party. But I sense it's getting very close to it.
I never thought I'd live to see a government in a more severe state of disintegration than John Major's ailing Tory government of the mid-1990s. But it's beginning to look as if the Brown government is in an even worse state. After all, despite all the sleaze, divisions and general lack of purpose, even the Major government did not suffer from a rush to the door by ministers in the wake of a Cabinet reshuffle (we are witnessing Westminster's first ever pre-shuffle).
Yet that is what is happening before our very eyes and the PM looks powerless in the wake of the exodus. The next 10 days look like being the most interesting, in party political terms, since Michael Heseltine challenged Margaret Thatcher in the autumn of 1990. As then, so now: we are in uncharted territory.
Nobody knows what's going to happen -- not even the PM!
Another bright new dawn, another day of high political drama begins.
The new Westminster consensus is that Chancellor Darling is toast -- and the practitioners of the dark arts in Downing Street are doing nothing to persuade us otherwise. Geoff Hoon could be burnt beyond repair as well.
Both were notorious "flippers" of their first and second homes, always to their huge financial advantage, and both claimed expenses to which they were not entitled (though the sums were modest).
We'll know their fate come the re-shuffle, expected on Friday (as the local election results come in), or Saturday (after the local results but before the European ones), or Monday (after all the results are announced and Gordon Brown knows just how bad it is) -- yes, you're right, we have no idea what day the reshuffle will be on!
As leading Cabinet ministers twist in the wind awaiting developments, today's lead editorial in the Guardian calls on Labour folk to vote Lib Dem in the European elections. It is quite an endorsement: during the last Euro-elections in 2004, when the Guardian was furious about the war in Iraq and the Lib Dems were the only mainstream anti-war party, the paper still stuck grudgingly with Labour.
Mr Brown will not be happy. But he will be even angrier with the Independent, which this morning urges the removal of the PM and an immediate election under a new leader. So, the left-wing press has finally decided that Mr Brown has to go -- and that will be significant in any palace coup attempts post-Thursday's elections.
The Prime Minister is rarely off our screens these days as he attempts to shore up his position. Much good it is doing him: despite back-to-back appearances on all the major networks he has yet to generate a single positive headline for himself, though he has managed to undermine his Chancellor and make several other cabinet colleagues feel distinctly queasy. One Labour wag joked with me that things would be much better if Mr Brown stopped appearing on TV!
We'll see less of him today because he'll be locked in Cabinet concocting his great constitutional reform agenda. It will, of course, merit serious consideration and no doubt our constitution could do with a spring clean. But sometimes Westminster seems to be on a parallel universe to the rest of the country: my sense is that the popular cry is not for any great reforms, just for honest politicians.
But no doubt you'll let me know ...
Last week I blogged during the recess to remind readers that Chancellor Alistair Darling still had some serious questions to answer about his expenses and related tax matters. Since then even more questions have emerged, the Lib Dems have accused him of having his "fingers in the till" and this morning the Chancellor bowed to pressure and promised to repay one particular claim.
More ominously, the Prime Minister was asked three times only an hour or so ago if Mr Darling would still be in his job in 10 days time -- and three times the PM dodged the bullet and stonewalled with variations of the phrase "Alistair Darling has been a great Chancellor". But even the dissembling spoke volumes: Mr Brown used the past tense!
Maybe these weekend rumours that he was about to be replaced by the PM's favourite policy wonk and political fixer, Ed Balls, are true after all (they seemed unlikely when I read them yesterday). As they would say in the less salubrious parts of Mr Darling's Edinburgh's constituency: "The Chancellor's jaiket is hingin' by a shoogly peg" [Translation on request].
But perhaps the PM's jacket is hanging only a little less precariously. I stick to the Westminster received wisdom that Mr Brown will not be the victim of a palace coup after Thursday's election results, even if they are dire for him and Labour, but I do so with a little less conviction every day.
Consider the following: if Ukip does come ahead of Labour in share of the popular vote in the Euro-elections (as some polls suggest and Ukip is now predicting) and the BNP win one or two seats (an important second condition for this scenario), then a majority of Labour MPs could well conclude that it was "time to ditch Gordon".
Coming behind Ukip would be humiliating; but presiding over a state of affairs which resulted in the first ever election of British fascists to a legislature (it never even happened in fascism's heyday in the 1930s) would be seen as an historic disgrace. It could tilt Labour over the edge into a "Brown must go" fervour.
Just how that rebellious mood would work out in practice I don't know. Alan Johnson is cheekily waving from the wings shouting "I'm here" but the senior "men in suits" who'd have to tell the PM his time was up -- Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson -- have so far ruled themselves out of this unappetising role. Which is why there are rumours this morning of Labour backbenchers taking matters into their own hands if the cabinet proves supine (see the Daily Mail splash). But I'm not quite sure how that works out either. All I can tell you is that the 10 days after the June 4th elections are going to be riveting. So stay tuned!
So no public spending review this autumn. Significantly, the confirmation came not from the Treasury or the Chancellor but from the ubiquitous Peter Mandelson, who now seems to have as much of a government-wide remit to pontificate on policy as the Prime Minister. Of course announcing there would be no spending review also helped deflect attention from the fact that the Business Secretary has been forced to pigeon-hole his plans for part-privatisation of the Post Office -- but I'm sure that's just a coincidence ....
I've said several times on-air that, with that sort of spending envelope, you wouldn't want to be Alistair Darling compiling this autumn's spending review -- especially not when your next door neighbour is talking constantly about never-ending rises in public spending. 
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